David Claerbout

The Belgian artist David Claerbout’s work sits at the crossroads between photography and film, encouraging crosspollination where photographs are given movement and film is brought almost to a halt. Close-ups of faces and architectural details to the seaside vista echo the panoramic sense of time that he seeks to articulate. His works mainly deals with a single situation, a single image, sometime presented from a myriad of positions. As in The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment, set in a small soccer field on a roof of the Kasbah of Algiers where young Maghrebians pause their soccer game as one of the players feeds a group of seagulls. To get a sense of the multiplicity of this single moment and the varied ways that it might be committed to memory, more than 50 000 photographs were captured and finally 600 projected photos were carefully composed to create this continuous moment in time. The succession of images of this “happy” moment reflects an aim to open up what the artist terms as “the suspicious gaze” turned against a particular group of people. The exhibition is the first major presentation of David Claerbout’s work in Sweden.